Browsing Everyone likes to live in a media bubble, but conservatives even more so. The media bubble that more and more people are choosing, however, is the one created by their favorite brands. That’s right, ‘“content marketing” is eating both journalism and paid advertising. (See also: Amway journalism) BTW, if you love engaging with brands, […]
- Zen Werewolf

I wrote a bit about the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion for Wired today: Around 9 o’clock on November 22, 1989, Chicago residents witnessed this epic hack. The evening news sportscast cut out, and a person in a strange mask appeared, dancing around in front of a spinning piece of metal—a rather dark incarnation of […]
- Zen Werewolf

Eliot Gardepe has released a computer game called Technoccult: Covenant. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with this site, and no I haven’t been in touch with the developer. I found it on Twitter. I downloaded it, but haven’t had time to play it much, but it appears to be an interactive fiction/adventure game […]
- Zen Werewolf

From Boing Boing: The colorful life of Jack Parsons as revealed in the biography Strange Angel by George Pendle will appear on AMC in miniseries form, according to a Deadline report. Ridley Scott and David Zucker will executive produce the series, which will be written by Mark Heyman (Skeleton Twins, Black Swan). Full Story: Boing […]
- Zen Werewolf

Status Update Feeling exceptionally bitter this afternoon, and since I missed last week, you get a double-dose of doom this time around. Browsing Lots of good writing about GamerGate and trolling since last I posted: The best overall thing comes from Deadspin, of all places: The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It’s […]
- Zen Werewolf

Mark Dery talks with Mikita Brottman, author of The Solitary Vice: Against Reading: I live in an old hotel, and I’ve recently been researching old newspaper items about the suicides that happened here, and the notes people left. However brief, I find them infinitely suggestive. They’re little vignettes of private tragedy, windows onto the changing […]
- Zen Werewolf

Jessy Irwin writes: Since 2011, billions of dollars of venture capital investment have poured into public education through private, for-profit technologies that promise to revolutionize education. Designed for the “21st century” classroom, these tools promise to remedy the many, many societal ills facing public education with artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, and other technological […]
- Zen Werewolf

Artist Ingrid Burrington talks about the problems with “drones for good”: The best possible scenarios for drone technologies being used in the future center on the question of who owns them? It’s mainly proprietary technology, mostly in the hands of the military, if we are talking about the large, heavy-duty, and weaponized drones, while the […]
- Zen Werewolf

Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett, authors of The New Soft War on Women, once again debunk the idea that there are important neurological differences between men and women: Baron-Cohen based his ideas on a study done in his laboratory of day-old infants, male and female. He claimed that boy babies looked at mobiles longer, […]
- Zen Werewolf

Engineering professor Barbara Oakley explains how she rewired her brain for math at the age of 26: When learning math and engineering as an adult, I began by using the same strategy I’d used to learn language. I’d look at an equation, to take a very simple example, Newton’s second law of f = ma. […]
- Zen Werewolf

Nathan Thompson writes: Tibetan mystics have long practiced a method to create sentient beings from the power of concentrated thought. Explorer Alexandra David-Neel was the first Westerner to discover the practice. “Besides having had few opportunities of seeing [tulpas], my habitual incredulity led me to make experiments for myself,” she wrote in her 1929 book […]
- Zen Werewolf

Ever since Warren Ellis posted about the “extinction aesthetic” I’ve been seeing it everywhere. For example, the new game The Long Dark. From Wired‘s review: As in Eric Kripke’s Revolution, The Long Dark imagines a world in which a “geomagnetic event” turns out the lights forever, ending humanity’s reign and repositioning nature for a comeback […]
- Zen Werewolf

Science fiction writer Tim Maughan reports on the real science of making animals smarter: In 2011, a research team led by Sam Deadwyler of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, used five rhesus monkeys to study the factors that lead people with diseases like Alzheimer’s to lose control of their thought processes. The researchers […]
- Zen Werewolf

Bob McMillan writes: We already know that if you use an online social network, you give up a serious slice of your privacy thanks to the omnivorous way companies like Google and Facebook gather your personal data. But new academic research offers a glimpse of what these companies may be learning about people who don’t […]
- Zen Werewolf

Three years ago Zappos founder Tony Hsieh launched a ambitious project to transformer downtown Las Vegas into a tech startup hub. It hasn’t exactly as planned. Nellie Bowles reports on a series of suicides by people involved in the project, and how the cult of positivity in the tech community may have contributed: Hsieh seemed […]
- Zen Werewolf

Status Update A few weeks ago I decided to try out working from a standing desk. I gave up this week. Surprisingly, the issue wasn’t my legs getting tired or back getting sore. The problem is that I couldn’t find a way to type while standing up that didn’t make my wrists hurt almost immediately […]
- Zen Werewolf

It doesn’t get much more biopunk than this: As hospitals in nations hardest hit by Ebola struggle to keep up, desperate patients are turning to the black market to buy blood from survivors of the virus, the World Health Organization warned. [...] Blood from survivors, referred to as convalescent serum, is said to have antibodies […]
- Zen Werewolf

Arran James follows up a previous post about extinction: It is the palliative care of the human that we should really consider. We open with a discussion of the dying Earth because it is this dying that is killing us: a vicarious species-suicide? These are dark thoughts that imply a loathing so great in our […]
- Zen Werewolf